Pope was not afraid to say sorry

Date: February 12 2013

Peter Stanford

Benedict XVI was a courageous pontiff who made a sincere attempt to restore the good name of the Catholic Church.

When Joseph Ratzinger was chosen by his fellow cardinals to be Pope in April 2005, he was universally billed as the continuity candidate. He had spent 25 years doing John Paul II's bidding in charge of the old Holy Office, and most Catholics believed they knew exactly what Benedict XVI stood for. Few expected any surprises. Yet now he has pulled off the biggest surprise of all by becoming the first pope in 600 years to resign.

The flawless logic of his resignation letter demonstrates that there is nothing clouding Benedict's reason. "To steer the boat of St Peter ... both strength of mind and body are necessary," he explained, before stating that he simply didn't have the stamina for it any more.

Which isn't in the least surprising. In any other multinational organisation of 1.3 billion members, the idea that an 85-year-old could continue to exercise absolute authority on a daily basis would be regarded as untenable. For the Pope is not some figurehead, the religious equivalent of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, abdicating on her 75th birthday to make way for "the next generation". He is an absolute monarch.

Logic, though, isn't the quality most often associated with the papacy. John Paul II and before him Paul VI carried on in office long after their bodies had failed them. They upheld the conviction in Catholicism that being elected pope is a divinely ordained duty, to be carried along a personal Via Dolorosa ("Way of grief") unto death.

But that is not what canon law stipulates. It explicitly sets out conditions for abdication, and so Benedict has invoked them. There is no mystery, or smoking gun, but rather just extraordinary courage and selflessness. Perhaps having watched John Paul II, a vigorous athlete of a man when he took office, decline into someone unable to move or to be understood, made Benedict's decision for him. He did not want to be a lame-duck pope; he knew that is not what the Catholic Church needs.

Yesterday's announcement inevitably prompts the question of how his eight years on St Peter's throne are to be viewed. As some kind of extended postscript to John Paul II's eye-catching, game-changing era? Or as a stand-alone epoch with distinctive policies and preoccupations?

The consensus leans heavily towards the former, but history could well judge Benedict more kindly. He may have lacked his predecessor's physical and spiritual charisma, and his unmissable presence on the world stage when major events were happening around him (the collapse of the Berlin Wall, two Gulf wars, September 11), but Benedict has nevertheless shown himself to be very much his own man. Two of his decisions as Pope illustrate what a break he made with his predecessor.

Just as they don't retire, popes also avoid at all costs admitting that they get things wrong, notwithstanding that they are infallible in certain matters of faith and morals. So few can have expected "God's Rottweiler", as he was known when he was carrying out John Paul's orders in relation to dissenters, to start breaking the mould as Pope by issuing mea culpas. But that is precisely what he did.

In January 2009, for instance, he wrote to every Catholic bishop in the world to confess to his own mishandling of the case of Bishop Richard Williamson. This self-styled English prelate, a member of the fundamentalist Lefebvrist group excommunicated by John Paul, had been readmitted to the Catholic Church on Benedict's watch. But days before, Williamson had given a TV interview in which he denied the Holocaust. The international outcry was huge – and magnified because of Benedict's own brief spell in the Hitler Youth. The Pope's response was a heartfelt and humble letter of apology.

His second volte-face came over the issue of paedophile priests. Under John Paul, the issue had been shamefully brushed under the carpet. The Polish pontiff, for example, declined to hand over to justice one of his great favourites, Father Marcial Maciel, the Mexican founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a traditionalist religious order. Despite well-documented allegations going back many years about Maciel's sexual abuse of youngsters in his seminaries, he was treated on papal orders as an honoured guest in the Vatican.

Yet within a month of taking office, Benedict moved to remove any protection and to discipline Maciel. He ordered the priest, then in his late 80s, never again to say mass or speak in public. And when Maciel died in 2008, his low-key funeral was followed by a rapid dismantling of the religious organisation he had built.

It was part of a concerted drive that made Benedict the first pope to sincerely attempt to address clerical abuse and restore the good name of the Catholic Church. In March 2009, for example, he sent another letter of apology, this time to Catholics in Ireland. "You have suffered grievously," he wrote to Irish victims of paedophile priests, "and I am truly sorry. I know that nothing can undo the wrong you have endured. It is understandable that you find it hard to forgive or be reconciled with the Church. In her name, I openly express the shame and remorse that we all feel."

That is quite a statement coming from a pope. It may be that his own past as a lieutenant of John Paul made him part of the problem, but he was unafraid to look this appalling betrayal of trust in the eye, not least in a series of meetings he arranged on his travels.

In fact Benedict wasn't much of a traveller. Global Catholicism and international leaders usually had to come to him in Rome rather than vice versa. Yet, though small of stature and delicate as bone china in demeanour, he grew slowly into the dignity of his office after it had initially threatened to swamp him.

So his 2010 trip to Britain did not, as had been widely predicted, pale beside the enduring and vivid memory of John Paul's barnstorming 1982 visit. Instead the crowds warmed to this serious man, with his nervous smile and understated humanity, as he kissed babies and waved from his Popemobile. Even sceptics responded positively to his determination to speak his mind about the marginalisation of religion.

There were, inevitably, notable failures in his reign. He was too much the career Vatican insider to shake up the curia, the Church's central bureaucracy. Its scheming and corruption was exposed for all to see in the "Vatileaks" scandal last year, with Benedict's own butler, Paolo Gabriele, convicted of stealing the Pope's private papers that revealed squabbling cardinals and unprincipled priests in the papal inner circle.

And Benedict's chosen "big tent" approach to leadership – which was to make him more German Shepherd than Rottweiler by welcoming dissidents back into the fold – also soon blew away. What remained was a willingness to make concessions to schismatic ultra-conservatives, but paper-thin patience with liberal theologians or grassroots movements such as that demanding genuine doctrinal change in Austria.

Patently more at home in a library or a theological college than on the world political stage, Benedict could be clumsy – as when in September 2006 his return to his alma mater, Regensburg University in Bavaria, was overshadowed by derogatory remarks about the prophet Mohammed which he quoted in his lecture. But he went out of his way to make amends on a trip to Turkey soon afterwards, joining Muslim clerics in prayer in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. This was only the second time a pope had ever entered a mosque.

For every failure, there was a success. His inaugural encyclical, Deus Caritas Est ("God is Love"), in December 2005 broke new ground, first in being written in such a way that non-theologians could follow it, and second in celebrating human love without the standard Catholic exemptions for gays, the unmarried and those using contraception. "Sex please, we're Catholics" was the reaction of the influential Catholic weekly, the Tablet.

Though his decision to opt for retirement will mark out this papacy in history, Benedict's eight-year rule did not see the Catholic Church perform spectacular U-turns on any major doctrinal questions. Yet it was also so much more than a seamless continuation of what had gone before.

John Paul II may have left his cardinals with little choice other than to elect Joseph Ratzinger as a safe pair of hands. But Benedict XVI has, by the way he has stood down and by his record in office, made it more possible that a moderniser, in touch with the realities of life in the 21st century, will be chosen as the 266th successor to St Peter.

Peter Stanford is a former editor of the Catholic Herald.

Telegraph, London

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